Family man patriarchy remix (Guile strategy thread)

Short Hurricane Kick, take #2:

Alright, so I’ve got some new methods for stoping the short hurricane kick over booms. From about 1/2 screen, you can score and air reset with the crouching strong. If the shoto ends up doing a longer version of the hurricane kick, your crouching strong will simply whiff and you’ll get to crouching fierce them after cross you over.

Now, if they’re further than half screen, if doesn’t look like there is anything that can beat out all version of the hurricane kick on reaction. After landing, the shotos I’ve played ususally do a jab shoryuken, a crouching poke, or go for the throw. They’ve got some decent options here, but I think making them block the crouching forward will give you the always nice frame advantage and push them out to a more ideal range for Guile. The only problem is you risk getting hit with a reversal dp or super. Is it worth the risk? How frequently can most tournament calibur players get reversals? I suppose you could mix up whether you do a meaty crouching forward or not, if they dp you get a rh fk for free. But in the end, I feel the risk is not worth the reward. Better to let him make the mistake and react to what he does.

Edit: After doing some real world testing, I found the crouching strong to be extremely effective. I you follow up booms from outside this distance, you can put yourself back in range and score yourself an air reset. Be careful though, because if he does a rh hurricane, you might just walk into it. Additionally, the sobat kick will hit them out of any hurricane kick if they attempt it really late, allowing you to walk and work your shenanigans.

If they do get over a boom with the short hurricane though, and your outside strong range, I now believe its a good idea to mix up whether you throw the cr. forward meaty or not. If you do, you’ll beat out throw attempts, low pokes, and non-reversal srks and hurricanes. If you don’t, you can punish srks and another hurricane.

Finally, if you anticipate a short hurricane (or have really good reaction time, not usre if its possible) you can do either a jumpin towards or straight up rh to kick them in they’re head and out of the hurricane. I’ve seen Muteki do this a few times, and I’ve been succesful doing it on anticipation.

The Back Breacker

Alright guys, we all know the back breaker (rh/forward air throw) looks cool, but is it a useful tool or just a neat trick? I’ve been exploring this recently, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the back breaker is a great weapon with some practical uses. I believe the back breaker is underutalized in SF2, so I thought I’d point out some positive things about it and its uses.

1.) High Damage- The back breaker does a ton of damage. In fact, it actually does as much or slightly more than T. hawks fierce hawk slam. Unfortuneatly, unlike the hawk slam, the back breaker can be teched. However, like all throws, if the unteched version of the throw is going to KO your opponent, it is untechable. This makes is ideal for WTF? finishes. Keep in mind that few people expect an air throw, which can make teching it rare depending on the situation.

2.) Air to Air- It’s all happened to us: you go for a jump in, as does your opponent, and bam! Back breaker. This is a very simple and unintuitive situation where the back breaker aids you with no work necessary. However, it should be noted that you can also predict your opponent’s jump in, and instead of waiting on a flash kick, go for the back breaker. If they’ve only got a quarter health, KO.

3.) Punishing blocked supers- Some characters (like Guile and Sagat) can be air thrown after their supers are blocked. Again, if their health is low enough that the back breaker can KO them, this is the right option. If not, its still unlikely that they’re going to tech it. Who expects the air throw? I havn’t tried this yet, but it might be possible to walk up and 3 cr. shorts and then cancel into a flash kick after blocking these supers. This does more damage, but is more difficult. Supering is also an option, but the damage is about the same if only 4 hits connect, as they often do in these situations.

4.) Whiffed DP- Alot of characters can be air thrown out of thier dp’s. Anticipating when they’re going to do it is the hard part. However, there are many situations in which it is very possible to anticipate a dp and punish with a back breaker. After doing a tick, such as a crouching jab or slow sonic booms, opponents are very liekly to dp to get out of trouble. Little do they know that they’ve just given you a fierce hawk slam. The back breaker on Chun li’s upkick’s can easily be done on reaction, just jump up and rh/forward after her kicks end. Guile’s FK seems to be similar, requiring perhaps a bit more anticipation, but still completely punishable during the recovery. My favorite scenario is when using the back breaker on Ken and Ryu’s jab dp. Alot of shotos get jab srk happy. Look for them to do it after ticks, after landing from hurricane kicks, hell, after doing a jab srk. You’ve got to anticipate this one, so be careful. As soon as Ryu and Ken reach the peak of they’re shoryuken, hit up and towards and immediatly hit rh and forward as soon as your off the gorund. Here’s Kurahashi doing it to Mike Watson twice in a round, using the jab tick to set him up both times:

[media=youtube]AMEp78fZmwU[/media]

Notice how much that first back breaker does! Guile’s moves arn’t very damaging, so I suggest you use the back breaker to capatlize on these oppurtunities.

In the end, it appears the back breaker is a solid counter and a great finisher.

Edit: found the backbreaker works well on Vega’s flip kicks

how do you guys deal with skilled gief players who are good at green-handing through booms and then instantly grabbiing into SPD, and also gief players who spam crouching fierce kick that beats guiles cruching medium kick.

my primary question whats the best move to do when gief a green handed through ur sonic boom, what can you do on reaction? I’ve tried cr.mk, but I get spd’ed, I tried cr.fierce kick, that can work but also can trade which isnt in guiles favour. Will a spinning backfist or crouch fiece punch hit gief before he can pull of the spd after a green hand?

My main tactic for dealing with gief players is to keep them trapped in the corner with random booms, over heads and crouching medium kick, but this is hard to do with a skilled gief player.

You can actually, just throw out cr. forwards after throwing booms when he’s in that close. If he hasn’t jumped yet, I think you should still be able to get off a cr. fierce, but maybe not, I should check that. You can also mix up wen you thro our booms and sweep him when he wiffs a green glove.

The crouching rh is giefs main way of getting in on Guile imo. Use the sobat kick and step kick from further out to circumvent this problem.

Also, I don’t think I’d rely on corner traps to beat gief. You want hang out at the sweet spot distance where if he jumps over a boom, you can standing fierce him or make him land on a crouching forward (mix it up cause he could use his trip guard or rh, in which case you’d trade). As he lariats and green gloves forwards, occasionally walk forward and hit him out of his recovery with your cr. forward. If you throw a slow boom and he laraits, you might even catch him with a cr. forward and boom for a 2 hit combo.

Remeber to use the sobat kick to safely move back, and just keep on rinsing and repeatig this strategy. If you flashkick him out of a jumping, get your spacing back and take back some terrain with your knee.

I’ve played both your Guiles with my 'Gief quite a lot and you definitely have different styles. It’s probably better for me if I don’t share my opinions since it’ll probably make my matches even tougher but who cares.

Firstly the match-up is obviously in Guile’s favour, I’m pretty average with Guile but still have no problems with 95% of 'Giefs and I suck at getting out of ticks. I just sonic boom (usually fierce to push them further back on block) and mix-up jabs, sobat kick and low forwards/roundhouse to make the booms less predictable. Backward sobat kicks means I get cornered quite fast sometimes and it’s more dangerous to throw booms. I usually stick with low forward, and if they try to sweep me, I sonic boom them but I find most of the time they’ll jump eventually and I flash kick, fierce boom and start the pattern again. As long as you mix it up, it can be difficult to do greenhands through them and the sobat kick/sweep usually stops 'Gief from getting too close.

From the Zangief POV, lariats are near useless close range due to the boom recovery. I just use them from the right distance to tempt some Guiles to flash kick and get knocked down. Even green hand from certain distances is not good enough as Guile has just enough time to sweep (although I’m not sure if it can be done under reaction or prediction).

I find Irepressible probably has a better success rate getting out of my ticks but both of you have decent reversal timing. On the offensive game, PFW sweeps my lariats a lot more where as Irepressible pushes me after knock down quite well with jumping forward, low forward, boom and also is quite annoying with those overheads/sweep mixups.

I find my main way of getting in against PFW is jumping because you use a lot of sobat kicks or sweep immediately after boom which gives me time to jump and SPD you. Irrepressible is so damn patient that I next to never get in with a jump without getting flashed kicked.

Any tips to improve my 'Gief would be appreciated. At the moment I don’t make enough use of the running bear grab and also don’t rely on footsies that much since I always get sonic boomed in the face.

Anyway good games against you guys, had some fun with my Blanka as well against you :lol:

Right, I noticed that if I throw out a forward right after a sonic boom, I can’t stop the jump in in time. It really annoys me that I lost to you today Hitwari, because the match was so in my favor. The forward after is a habit I’m going to have to brake. I’d like to play you again some time.

Hitwari’s zangief is way above average and he knows the match up well so dont feel too bad. Gief has some useful tool for breaking down guiles defense.

The one thing I need to start using more is guiles crouching strong punch and jumping light kick crossover combos. I’ve seen marsgatti2009 use the cross over to escape when trapped in the corner by heavy hitters like rog, honda and gief

One thing everyone should learn from Marsgatti is the the crossup short into 2 or 3 cr. shorts canceld into a rh fk. Its devastating. If they block the corss up, they’ve got to guess if your going to throw or go fro the shorts, since the shorts must be blocked low.

I usually have an all guile session with marsgatti and a few other guile main players, you should join us, send me a FR and I’ll invite you next time we have one.

Yeah I usually play alot with marsgatti when he’s on. I’m gonna be out of town for a week, but I’ll send you a fr when I get back.

cool, we can plot the downfall of hitwari’s zangief

lol. Weird thing is I beat his blanka yesterday 3 round to 1 or something like that. Go figure.

My Blanka sucks :wasted:

Actually I have good and bad games with him. I’m still working on the Guile match-up since I think if Guile turtles he can do pretty well. I usually use him to in some of 'Giefs bad match-ups such as Dhalsim, Honda, Guile, Claw.

blanka is hard for guile, but not impossible with a bit of strategy, turtling, offence and crossups.

Balrog however is a nightmare. I played smq91’s balrog yesterday and lost 15 times, I did eventually manage to win 2 games, which for me is pretty darn good against his balrog and they wernt the usual one-sided matches that they usually are, good thing about it tho I’m learning that matchup, slowly but surely. some rules I learnt the hard way are:

not too much pokingv - since he punch a poking low forward with ease
no booms with he was super
dont flash kick the buffalo head butt on the way up
dont even attempt to flash kick balrog super unless u really have to
watch out for double jumps
be patient and balrog will jump
when he’s far to medium distance, spam booms, if he buffalo headbutts, then attack it spinning back fist

New option select:

After you knock down dictator, and go for a deep crossup, he can escape with devil’s reverse.
To counter this, input the following command:

Crossup short, low fierce, low strong.

You have to do this quickly.

If done correctly, the low fierce will come out and hit him if he does a Devil’s reverse, and the low strong will come out otherwise into the usual hit confirm.

(the principle is the slight freeze that takes place if a move is blocked or hits. If he does a devils reverse, your crossup whiffs and you are free to move slightly earlier)

Of course, even if you connect the low fierce, it still sucks alot more than landing an ambiguous crossup into death :sad:

There may be follow ups after the low fierce but I havent tested yet.

If you do a late meaty jumpin in lk, you’ll hit him out of the Devil’s reverse. I wonder if you could then immediatly go for another meaty jump in during the air reset before he has his charge or can jump out of it.

Edit: Brian, I’ve been looking at the characters you can do an ambiguous crossup against, and this is what I’ve got so far and I’d like to confirm:

The big 2 seem to be Bison and Chun, followed to a lesser extent by Cammy, Fei, Blanka, Dhalsim.

Is it really true that theres a timing for the crossup where dictator must get a reversal message on his DR in order to escape, but such that if he does, the crossup will hit him out of the air?

I was under the impression that if you want to hit his DR out of the air with the crossup, you’re going to have to give him a larger input window for his DR. Is this wrong? It would be nice to test follow ups to both this and my option select low fierce. Its too bad the training mode doesnt have a record feature…

I agree with your list of characters you can hit with the really ambiguous crossup. I never try it against blanka unless I need to make a comeback though, since if your opponent can piano a reversal then youre going to die.

You bring up a good point. That was something I took for granted, but should really be tested. Your option select is very nice though. Thanks for the contribution.

One more question regarding the ambiguous cross up- does the term apply strictly to when you crossup your opponent but they are forced to block one way or another based on how deep the crossup was, or does it also apply to when you actually don’t crossup you opponent but land in front of them? Also, I’m trying to decide whether this “fake” crossup is an effective strategy.

Oh yeah, you can add Guile to the list of ppl the ambiguous crossup works on.

I don’t think there’s a standard definition of the phrase “ambiguous crossup”. :smile:

Anyway, yeah even characters not listed, like shotos say, you can sometimes trick them into blocking the wrong way if you just barely don’t cross them up and land on their front side.
I certainly throw this in against them too. Its just for some reason its a bit easier for ppl to figure out which way to block then in the “true” ambiguous cases where you always land on their back side.

I’m not sure why that is though. I mean, in principle I would think that every crossup would have a 1 pixel difference separating it from having to be blocked in different ways. 1 pixel is probably impossible to discern for the person being crossed up… so maybe with practice every crossup attempt can essentially be made into a 50/50.

I think the reason its easier to stop the psuedo ambiguous cross up is because your sprite helps you find your midpoint, where as with the “real” ambiguous cross up, you only have empty space.

But yeah, in general, it looks like against characters that you can do the “real” ambiguous crossup on, its usually your best option. Against everyone else, mix up using the “fake” ambiguous, cr. shorts xx fk combos, and good old fashion tick throws.